How To Monetize Your Real Estate CRM

The ability to monetize your CRM is directly tied to marketing to people based off of the relationship categories that you have chosen. So how do you get started? The first thing you need to do is think of each group as a independent from each other. There’s going to be things that you send out to everybody but you need to be able to send specific messaging to specific categories, such as buyer or seller leads or maybe current clients or past clients. Based off of who they are, you want to create a different marketing or campaign track to that individual group.

Take for example any new leads coming from online lead sources such as Zillow or Trulia or realtor.com. When these leads come in, decide if what you want them to receive is different than what you’re sending to other people. Should they get more contacts in the beginning and then ultimately tapered down later on? (That’s what we teach our clients to do.) Or is it somebody who’s a past client and doesn’t need to hear from you quite as frequently, but they do in fact need to hear from you? In that case, what you need to do is create some personalized calls throughout the year. If you put these different campaign tracks together and think of them as independent of each other, it allows you to tailor your marketing to the context of the relationship, bringing more value and getting more value for yourself out of that relationship.

Bring Value

It’s important to remember this: any campaign or any marketing that you do, it doesn’t matter who it’s to, the very first thing you need to do in your campaign is bring value. If you’re not bringing value and all you’re doing is making a request or thinking about what’s in it for you and not figuring how to give them something of value, you’re going to to alienate your friends, your family and the relationships that you have.

The Facebook “Salesman”

Here’s a great example: how many of you know those people that started selling all those vitamin waters, all those different shakes or drinks, or things on Facebook? It seems like once they join these different programs, they start abusing all of their personal relationships.

“Hey, buy my water! It’s going to cause you to lose 15 pounds, grow more hair, and gain more inches where you need more inches, if you know what I’m saying.”

You don’t want to be that guy.

You don’t want people to feel like you’re using them. You want people to feel like you’re bring value to them first before you ever try to get something from them. When you do make that ask, you want to make sure that is relevant or appropriate based off of that relationship. Here’s a great example: if you’ve got a current client, maybe somebody that you’ve never worked with before, and you’re in the process of closing the deal. This is probably not the right time necessarily to ask for referrals. Now, you may get a referral from them but you haven’t finished the deal yet. They haven’t seen you fully take them from lead to past client so their relationship with you is still in the early stages. It’s a little premature to start asking them things like “who do you know that’s ready to buy or sell? Can you send any of your friends or family my way? I’d love to help them, too!” You need to finish helping them first and then after the deal is closed, that’s probably a more appropriate time to start asking them those questions.

One At A Time

As you’re designing your campaign tracks or you marking tracks to each of the different relationship groups, you need to focus on one at a time. Don’t do to the shotgun approach. Take one campaign at a time. Take one group at a time. Figure out what they need, what value you can bring, set up that track then move on to the next one and then the next one. It’s only when you do that that you are going to be able to get more done in less time and be effective at connecting with people that you want serve.

Is This Valuable?

Always ask yourself “what would somebody like this find valuable from me? What valuable thing can I give them that they aren’t getting from somewhere else or another agent or any other resource? What insight, what perspective, and what ideas can I bring? What gifts or valuable things can I bring to this relationship that they can’t get anywhere else?” That’s what’s going to keep you top of mind. That’s what’s going to keep them coming back to you, referring the friends and family and ultimately building that long-term, valuable relationship that everybody wants from the people in their database.